The Naiad Voyages

Mark Austen

2015.09.25 - Foredeck removal

Friday, 25 September, 2015

Not much work carried out on Naiad so far, the Summer is busy with events but now I have every Friday off until Christmas and it’s time to get some serious work done.

Today’s task was to get the foredeck off and I did this by drilling a number of notes through the deck from underneath so I could see where to cut and then to use my power saw to cut the deck off between the deck beams. I will leave all the beams in for now to help give her some rigidity but eventually all but the foremost two beams will be cut back as beams for the extended side deck.

The hardest part of this job was drilling the holes from underneath the foredeck. There’s not much room and many of the holes were done with my arm almost fully extended to get the drill bit in the correct place. Fortunately, I can use both arms to do this so the strain was shared. first right, then left…

These two beams will be left as is since the new foredeck will go here and the front end of the cabin will rest on the second beam. The remainder of the beams will be cut back to support the side decks and the centre section used to make more deck beams for the remainder of the side decks.